How talking machines are taking call centre jobs

The biggest threat to jobs might not be physical robots, but intelligent software agents that can understand our questions and speak to us, integrating seamlessly with all the other programs we use at home and at work. And call centres are particularly at risk.

Last week we learned that British retail giant Marks & Spencer is moving 100 switchboard staff to other roles because chatbots are taking over their duties.

"All calls to 640 M&S stores and contact centres now handled via Twilio-powered technology," boasted the California-based tech company operating the new system.

M&S is now using Twilio's speech recognition software and Google's Dialogflow artificial intelligence (AI) tool to transcribe customers' verbal requests and understand their intent. Then the call is routed to the appropriate department or shop.

The system could handle about 12 million queries a year, Twilio says.

With the Bank of England's chief economist warning that the UK requires a skills revolution to avoid AI leaving vast swathes of people "technologically unemployed", it seems fair to question how disruptive these systems may be.

That call centre workers may be particularly at risk from AI is something that has been discussed for many years.

But now the shift actually seems to be happening, says Brian Manusama, an analyst at market research firm Gartner.

"The number one use case for applying AI is in this call centre and customer service space," he explains.

"At the end of 2017 about 70% of all use cases in AI were related to customer service and call centres."

Several million people are employed in call centre roles in the US and UK and hundreds of thousands more rely on such work in countries like India and the Philippines. Unless these people quickly learn new skills, they could soon be out of work."Countries like India may have a huge problem with increasing unemployment," says Mr Manusama.

But chief executive of IPsoft, Chetan Dube, told me he was bullish about the prospect when discussing his company's widely used digital assistant Amelia - billed as "the most human AI". It can understand natural language - not just set commands - and can discern meaning from the context of a conversation.

"Has that not always been the case?" he asks. "Jobs have always been displaced by technology."

Currently, companies, such as large US insurer Allstate, use Amelia to interact with human call centre workers, not replace them. It provides the information staff need to answer phone-based customer queries, reducing call durations from 4.6 to 4.2 minutes on average. That might not sound much, but those saved seconds add up across millions of calls in an industry where time is money.

This role of AI as helper rather than replacement is also being promoted by Observe.AI, a start-up that recently raised $8m (£6.2m) to develop its emotion analysis system.

It listens to incoming customer calls, interprets the emotional content - is the customer irate about something going wrong? - and automatically brings up appropriate response information on the call centre worker's computer screen.

"Our mission, broadly, is to augment the [human] agent, not necessarily get rid of the agent," explains co-founder Swapnil Jain.

"As soon as the customer says they want to cancel a credit card, the technology understands that, goes ahead and gets the instructions for the agent on how to cancel a credit."

His company is already working with call centre firms in the Philippines.

But it seems clear that AI will take over most human call centre operations in time. Observe.AI's technology may be able to automate some customer queries entirely, Mr Jain admits.

"We are still trying to figure out where we want to go," he says.

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"Jobs have always been displaced by technology," says IPsoft's Chetan Dube

IPsoft's Amelia can already handle live phone calls and even make outbound calls. For example, Spanish bank BBVA and Nordic bank SEB both allow customers to speak to Amelia directly.

But Mr Dube thinks it will be able to do much more.

"I want to be able to have [Amelia] process my mortgage," he says. "Can she do a risk analysis for me, can she process my credit card consolidation request?"

He adds that what makes Amelia different is the system's combined approach of speech recognition and logic-based interpretation of queries. In other words, Amelia has a built-in model of things that a customer or staff member might ask about and how those things relate to one another. That helps her to answer intelligently. Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45272835

Call centre services – A labour of love

Phones ringing, lines blinking, and a room full of chatter – people tethered to their desks by phone headsets and computers, forcing a smile and doing their best to please the person on the other end of the line.

In today’s modern world, this is not an unfamiliar scene – it’s a call centre. Unfortunately, the stigma when one pictures a call centre is one where the workers at those desks are often grumpy, tired from dealing with angry customers or tense work environments, and quickly burnt-out and unhappy.

One of the challenges faced by managers in the call centre industry is maintaining quality of service, a tough bid with disgruntled workers behind the desks – and one of the many reasons companies prefer to outsource to an overseas call centre, rather than one in-country.

One BBC article describes call centres as the “factories of the 21st century,” and the idea might not be too far off base in some instances. Timed bathroom breaks and closely monitored production (a required limited number of calls, plus monitoring and recording of calls for quality control) — all sound like modern day echoes of the old factory production lines of the past.

“More people have worked in call centres than ever worked in the mining industry,” says Matt Thorne, who wrote a novel based on his experiences in a call centre, “and I researched that in 1998.”

According to an independent employment studies report published by the Institute for Employment Studies at the University of Sussex, the number of people working in call centres has grown over the years. The study states, “The increase in the use of call centres has been driven by customer demand for ‘out of office hours’ access to a range of services, as well as their desire to access call centre services from home. Coupled with this, employers also favour contact centres because they enable organisations to cut the cost of servicing customers, by centralising customer-facing operations.”

While the job may not be physically tasking, multiple studies show that working in a call centre requires an enormous amount of emotional labour, something which can be quite stressful. Call centre services in the U.K. often staff people who, oftentimes, see their job as “transitional work,” or just something to get by until the next big break.



But, more often than not, due to financial obligations, many workers find themselves at the grind a wee bit longer than they’d planned, thus contributing to morale and a crestfallen frustration of dreams deferred. In other words, people in the U.K. might not necessarily work at a call centre because they want to, but rather, because they have to. It’s no wonder call centre outsourcing in the U.K. has gradually shifted overseas.

Meanwhile, call centre companies abroad bring employment opportunity to densely populated areas where people are extremely grateful to have a job. What’s more, some companies, such as South East Asia-based PITON-Global, for example, pride themselves on creating a work environment that fosters positive energy, making sure their workers get paid decent wages, and are primed to see their work as more than just a job, but rather, as a career.

By providing incentives to prevent a high turn-over rate, people want to work there, and are happy to have a job that might pay more than another outsourcing company who just wants to take advantage of cheap labour. This one shift in mindset creates a completely different perspective, and a different caliber of worker, for the same price or less than the U.K. call centre worker.

Which company would you rather work with: a U.K.-based call centre with not motivated, unhappy employees, or a company who has created job opportunities for smart, ambitious people hungry for a decent paycheck, who are happy to define their work in a call centre as a long-term labour of love?

Photo by ROOM on Unsplash

Call Centre Outsourcing to the Philippines – A Key Consideration for UK-based Companies

Outsourcing has become a major industry for economies and countries around the world.

The Philippines is no different. Call centre outsourcing to the Philippines is booming.

One of the largest and most influential industries is the business processes outsourcing industry. Call centre companies have helped create and define the business processes outsourcing industry and the economy within the Philippines. Businesses around the world are choosing to outsource their call centres to the Philippines. English speaking countries are looking to archipelago nation to help meet demands and create satisfied customers. UK companies have been migrating their contact centre outsourcing requirements to the Philippines in greater quantities as the success becomes more tangible.

Many large companies have caught on; it’s not just London-based firms. Companies based in smaller cities are outsourcing just as much and seeing the same results.

Call centre outsourcing to the Philippines from UK is growing in popularity and frequency because of the outcome. It is beneficial for the companies and their customers to outsource. Enterprises are seeing growth in productivity and quality while also seeing their budgets decrease.

Though money is not the main driving factor for outsourcing, it is a consideration.

Quality and efficiency are the largest motivating factor for outsourcing because companies and customers want the best customer service possible, and the Philippines are providing the quality people want.

The UK and the Philippines have a great amount of cultural overlap. There is a mutual understanding of interpretations, meanings, culture, and nuance, which is beyond necessary when in a discussion.

Language is another key factor. The Philippines has a huge workforce of proficient English speakers, which is necessary when working with UK firms and customers. Call centres need to be able to understand their customer and the company in order to facilitate the need or problem.

Quality and efficiency are the driving force for UK-based enterprises to relocate their call centres to the Philippines. Customers want their interactions with a call centre to be as efficient as possible and so do companies. Efficiency saves time for the customer, which they appreciate, and it saves the company money. Getting as much done as quickly as possible is the ultimate goal. Efficiency should never get in the way of quality because quality is arguably the most important factor. A quick and wrong reply helps no one and is ultimately not efficient. Being thorough and taking the time to help the customer by listening is the reason call centres exist.

The Philippines understood this need for quality and efficiency, which is why they are the leading call centre outsourcing destination in the world. Cost is a motivating factor for companies and customers by default. Cutting costs on non-revenue earning sections of a company helps make a product less expensive, which the customer appreciates. Companies are outsourcing their contact centres to the Philippines because the upgrade in quality and efficiency helps cuts cost all by itself.

Adding in the living expenses differential, costs are cut even more. This helps the company grow and expand, while also allowing the customer more spending power.

Today, the Philippines is home to almost a thousand call centre companies providing
services to the UK and the world. These companies range in size from startups to huge companies employing several thousand people. Most call centre companies fall in the small to midsized range. Piton-Global is a call centre provider in the Philippines, and they excel having won several awards for their services. The company has managed to establish itself as a preferred provider for UK-based businesses over the last decade.

The Philippines has a booming business processes outsourcing industry built on the hard

Call centres offer a wide variety of service from picking up the phone to answering questions to technical support to payment processing to customer acquisition and everything in between. It is a vital service in today’s busy world. Making sure this service is provided at the highest quality
and most efficient is what the Philippines does.

Call centres in the Philippines have become popular with companies because of the excellent services they receive